Into the Wild

Into the Wild is the true story of Chris McCandless, a young man who died at 24 in the Alaskan wilderness, when he was off on his dream adventure to the last frontier. Chris graduated from Emory University in 1990, told his parents he was packing up a few things for law school, then disappeared from the face of the earth into a hippie/homeless subculture for a couple of years, always in search of himself. He read Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Jack London and wanted to do what they had done: to deny himself comforts and to sustain himself from day to day with genuine people, away from the artificiality of the people he had grown up and gone to school with.

He met and befriended many people along the way: a farmer in the upper Midwest, a retiree in the desert, some hippies on the road, and others. Everyone he met seemed to like him. Everyone seemed to admire him. But nobody seemed to understand him. The drop-outs he met along the way knew what their fellow drop-outs were like, and Chris didn't fit the profile. He graduated with honors. He was a top athlete. He had a tremendous work ethic. He was a regular guy who liked to knock back a few beers. He was not particularly rebellious or disgruntled. He had no signs of mental illness, nor was he a chronic malcontent. He simply chose to heed the advice of his hero, Thoreau: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." Chris heard a different drummer, and marched to that beat, all the way to his death.

When an Alaskan named James Gallien dropped Chris off at the head of the Stampede Trail, he knew the kid was in trouble. Chris's gear was far too light to survive what he wanted to do. Chris was not only unconcerned about his inadequate preparation, but he cavalierly left his watch and his map in Gallien's vehicle, and headed into the wilderness without a compass or radio, carrying no food but a ten pound sack of rice. Gallien's heart went out to the idealistic kid and he forced Chris to accept a pair of waterproof boots.

It was miraculous that Chris managed to live out there for 113 days. He did so only because he got the boots, and because he found an abandoned bus which he did not know of before he began. That bus, placed there by hunters, contained a bed and a stove and provided shelter from rain, snow and wind. The existence of that bus in the middle of nowhere, far from any roads, was in one sense a blessing of providence. In another sense, it spared Chris from being killed by exposure or grizzlies, but did so only to extend his life long enough that he would die a much more prolonged and lonely death from starvation (or perhaps food poisoning from eating the wrong plant.)

It was, in fact, miraculous that Chris even lived long enough to get to Alaska in the first place. He probably should have died at least three earlier times in his short life. One summer in his college years he almost died in the other temperature extreme, while testing his ability at desert survival. One time he got a kayak out in the open sea and barely managed to struggle back to shore. A third time he went whitewater rafting in the mighty Colorado river, by himself, with neither training nor experience. Each time he could have died, perhaps should have, but survived. By the time he made it to Alaska he was far too confident of himself and his ability to escape from any predicament. And that confidence was almost justified. When he was ready to leave, he managed to backtrack effectively the same way he had come in, but he ran into one major snag. The tiny creek he had waded across in the frozen earlier months had become a raging torrent when the snows melted off the mountains and it began to rain. Unable to cross the river, he was trapped behind it, and no game animals were trapped with him.

Writer/director Sean Penn told the story as objectively as he could, neither condemning nor rhapsodizing Chris. Like everyone else who knew Chris, Penn admired many things about him, but didn't understand him. In order to keep the story true to reality, Penn used a meticulously researched source book as well as the recollections of Chris's family. The source book included the wilderness diaries of Chris himself. As auteur, Penn did precisely what he should have done: he kept the narrative accurate and easy to follow. Since Chris's pre-Alaskan life was separated into many unlike segments, Penn used the Alaskan conclusion as the framing device and broke that narrative up with long flashbacks to the other completely unrelated adventures which preceded Alaska, each of which had a different cast of characters, in the manner of a classic picaresque novel. Each time he returned to the Alaskan framing story, Penn had told us a little more about the man in the bus, until we finally started to change our minds about a guy who at first had seemed like an arrogant know-it-all prick. By the end we could see what had made Chris unique, and why people always seemed drawn to him. The flashback device also allowed Penn the writer to milk the emotion of Chris's death without wallowing in his suffering. In fact, the death was treated quite matter-of-factly, but it is deeply affecting to hear Chris in the flashbacks talking about what a great time he's going to have in Alaska. There are few things more affecting than optimism which we know to be baseless, but the poignancy in the script is derived from the optimism itself rather than the later misery. A nice bit of scripting, that, and a real sign that Penn is mastering subtlety. The direction is marvelous in another way. Sean Penn has always been great at drawing top performances from actors, and he did so again here, especially from Emile Hirsch and Hal Holbrook, but also from several others.

I'll be honest and say that I would have trimmed this film to a bit under two hours, because I got a little restless during the film's 150-odd minutes, but I understand why Penn wanted to use as much of Chris's life as he did. In the last two years of his existence, that boy had more adventures in more places than most of us will ever have in all our lives. Even as he realized he was dying, Chris wrote a note to posterity which mentioned what a great life he had had, and how he had no regrets. Penn wanted to show us the full expanse of the adventures in that life, and to develop the background that led him to that path and the characters he met along the way. There was a lot to show, and it consisted of good stories in picturesque locales, so the director fell in love with his story, too much so to lose any of it.

Now that the film is over, do I know what made Chris so reckless or what caused him to hear a different drum? No. I don't really see any connections between the various parts of his life.  But I know he lived his life the way he wanted to, and that it was an interesting one, falling short only in length. One could say the same thing of Chris that my dad once told me of himself in his old age, "Everything in life was great - except the duration."

Film clips:

• Signe Olsen
• Nudists

Signe Olsen

 

 

The Chambermaid

(2004)

Fiona Horsey returns. You have to love this girl as she has no problem showing off her body. Not a great film, but it gets a lot of points for the nudity. Fiona gives it all up including some very nice "Fuzz-Buzz".

Film clips.